


Consent

by StrangerWriter



Series: A Storm is Coming [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Brenner is a manipulative asshole, Hopper being a dad, Implications of sexual abuse, Nothing explicit, teen "exploration"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 15:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17921774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangerWriter/pseuds/StrangerWriter
Summary: During a late night thunderstorm, Hopper learns that he needs to knock before walking into the bedroom of a teenage girl, and El learns a new rule.





	Consent

“Ow, fucking shit!” Hopper heard El exclaim into the dark. She had gotten up to go to the bathroom in the night and must have stubbed her toe. Due to the approaching storm, Hopper had been awake too. The wind and rain were already quite loud.

He contained his laughter so that she wouldn’t know he had heard her. He supposed that his vocabulary was rubbing off on her in maybe not the best way. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little proud every time he heard her use a new expletive correctly.

After listening to the howling wind and thunder that seemed like it was not any closer than it had been 30 minutes ago, he got up in search of a weather report on the radio. He flipped the switch on the lamp and nothing happened. Apparently, the power was already out.

He found the one candle he had sitting on a shelf and patted down his work jacket for his lighter. Eventually he scrounged up some batteries, the radio, and a flashlight, and flipped through the static until he found an AM station with decent reception. The storm was still a bit out from Hawkins and it sounded like it was going to be a decently severe one. He figured with storm and all the noise he had been making, El was probably still awake too. They hadn’t had many storms yet since it was early spring, but he knew that they made her uncomfortable, so he decided to check on her.

He approached her cracked door and pushed it open, shining the flashlight inside towards the floor in case she had been asleep. “Hey kid, you- oh! Shit. Sorry, sorry,” he immediately apologized when he saw her.

She had been on top of her covers with two hands inside her pajama bottoms. Though it was dark, and she was still clothed, it had been pretty obvious what was going on.

Hopper closed her door and sat down on the couch, silently swearing. He hadn’t even considered she would have been doing _that_ right now. El came out of her room a minute later and tip toed behind the couch to the bathroom. She turned the faucet on and a trickle of water came out, enough to wet her hands, before it stopped. She turned the knobs back and forth, but nothing happened. El dried her hands on a towel and cautiously stepped out, not sure just how upset Hopper was going be with her.

“The water isn’t working?” she asked softly.

“Yeah, looks like the wind knocked the power out,” he told her. El didn’t exactly understand how power worked and only knew they ran out of power when bad things were happening. Her face must have shown her concern. “No big deal. It happens sometimes with storms. Sounds like this one is pretty strong.”

El nodded and sat down on the other end of the couch, tucking her feet under her. Hopper sounded different when he talked to her, and she knew that he was probably mad at her over what he saw her doing in her bedroom- something bad.

“I’m sorry if I was bad. I won’t do it again,” El promised, her voice already on the edge of tears. She absently fiddled with a button on the back of the couch.

Hopper hadn’t planned to bring it up unless she did.

He reached for the radio and turned it off. El didn’t realize that the static had been making her feel even more anxious.

“No, kid, I’m sorry. You weren’t doing anything wrong. I’ll uh, I’ll try to get better at knocking.”

Did he want to think about his kid doing _that_? Hell no, but he felt awful that he hadn’t even thought about her privacy before walking into her bedroom unannounced in the middle of the night. He remembered the one and only time his dad walked in on him doing the same thing as a teen; he had gotten beat for it. He knew that he was a shit adoptive parent, but he tried to at least be a little better than his own parents had been.

“Touching is inappropriate,” El reminded him quietly, as if she were asking to be punished.

Hopper sighed. He could see where she had gotten that idea from.

El had remembered what that word meant, and she knew that it was a bad thing to do. But sometimes, especially when she was felt sad or worried at night, she did it just to occupy her mind with something to relax her until she fell asleep.

“Well, yes and no,” Hopper attempted to explain. “Touching in your bedroom, if you are all by yourself isn’t inappropriate. It’s a normal thing that a lot of kids do.”

“Normal,” El repeated, even though she didn’t believe him. It was something her and Papa did, and she knew that it definitely wasn’t normal after Hopper had told her so months ago.

“Uh yeah, yeah. It’s-” He paused thinking of the right word. “-natural to be curious about things.”

“But it’s not normal to touch yourself with grownups?”

“Right, yeah. It’s not okay for an adult to ask you to touch yourself like that. Or them,” Hopper added.

El was obviously confused, and he knew that was kind of his fault for not explaining it correctly the first time they had this conversation.

“Why not?” She knew for the past few months that what her and Papa did was bad, but she didn’t know why and hadn’t felt brave enough to ask until now.

El and Hopper both stared at the flickering flame on the candle on the end table in front of them instead of looking at each other.

“Kids and adults shouldn’t touch each other in that way. That’s something meant just for grownups. Your Papa knew that it was the wrong thing to do.”  He hated using that word- _Papa-_ but it was all that El knew him as.

“I told him it was okay,” El admitted, feeling a heavy sense of guilt. She never told Papa no. She never asked him to stop. She had powers, and she could have used them, but she never did.

“That’s the thing about consent. It doesn’t matter what you said because you are just a kid. He was the adult and he knew that it wasn’t right to hurt you.”

“Papa didn’t always hurt me,” she confessed because she felt like she had to. Sometimes it felt nice, sometimes not.

Hopper took a deep, silent breath before he spoke. “Well, I’m glad to hear that.”

It wasn’t exactly the truth, but he didn’t want El to feel any guiltier than she already had.

“What is con-sent?”

“Consent. It means that you agree to do something, like someone has your permission. But if you are just a kid, then there really is no such thing as consent when it comes to something like touching, because you are too young to fully understand. So even if you did tell your Papa yes, it doesn't matter. He was... a very manipulative person.”

“Manipulative is like bad?”

“Uh-huh. Bad,” Hopper confirmed. “Someone who manipulates you, they lie to get people to do what they want.”

El nodded.

She knew that was true. She’d heard Papa lie to the other men before. And now she knows that he lied to her many times too.

Hopper looked over at her for the first time since starting this conversation. He could see in the candle light that she was blinking back tears.

It was a minute before she spoke. “So it’s okay if I touch myself if I’m all by myself. And Papa was _manipulative_. And I need to _consent_ before someone else can touch me,” she said summarizing the new facts and words she learned.

Hopper nodded. “New rule, yeah? I give you the consent to use your powers on anyone who touches you without your consent. I don’t care who it is.”

El smiled. She liked that rule.

Suddenly a loud thunderbolt cracked, and El nearly jumped out of her skin. “Woah there,” Hopper laughed lightly, patting her leg. “Must be a good game of bowling up there,” he tried to joke, before he realized El had no idea what he was talking about. “You know, they say when it’s thundering that it’s just the people in heaven bowling,” he explained, attempting to lighten the mood.

El knew about bowling from tv. But she didn’t know about, “Heaven?”

“Heaven, yeah. It’s the place where you go to after, uh, after you die,” he said, finally settling for honesty. He wasn’t sure he believed in any of that, but it was a nice idea.

“A good place?”

“Yeah, it’s a real nice place.”

“Do you think Papa is in heaven?”

“No kid, I don’t.” First and foremost, he didn’t think that Brenner was even dead, but he wasn’t going to go there. “There’s a special place for people like him, kind of like being in the upside down. They don’t get to go to heaven.”

El liked that idea too. Papa didn’t deserve to go to a nice place.

It was a minute before Hopper spoke again. He had dealt with the grief over El’s past months ago, but it was quickly reappearing, and he knew he had to contain it in front of her. “So uh, anybody ever teach you how to tell how far away a thunderstorm is?” he asked trying to change the subject. He brought his palm up to quickly wipe his cheek.  

El shook her head no and moved closer to him. “Well thunder is just the sound that the lightning makes. We see the lightning first, and then it takes some time for the thunder sound to get to our ears. When you see the lightning, you start counting until you hear the thunder.”

A lightning bolt lit up the room and the two of them started counting.

“One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand…” until they got to 11 and heard thunder rumble in the distance. Hopper used the noise to camouflage a sniffle and took a deep breath before he continued to explain it to her. “For every 5 seconds we count, the storm is 1 mile away.”

“So that’s…2 miles,” El finished, curling up next to him.

“Yeah, just over 2 miles.”

El counted all the thunder and lightning bolts for the next few minutes, until she felt brave enough to say something that had been on her mind for a long time.

“I didn’t like when Papa would put his penis inside me,” she confessed quietly, using the grammatically correct term that she had been taught years ago. She also didn’t like when he held her wrists down and kept her from moving around. She didn’t like when he kept touching her too much or with too much force. She didn’t like the times when he made her bleed. She didn’t like when he didn’t stay with her afterwards. But she wasn’t ready to tell Hopper all that just yet.

Hopper didn’t immediately reply. He physically couldn’t. Hearing those words out loud made him feel like he was going to be sick. El quickly glanced up at his face and then laid her head back down, wrapping her arms around him as if he was the one who needed comforting.

It felt like an eternity before he could manage to get anything out. “I really don’t like that he did that either,” Hopper finally agreed. He pressed his eyes closed and realized his grip around her was maybe just a little too tight, but El seemed content.

They stayed together on the couch, while El silently counted to herself until she felt her eyelids growing heavy. El counted out loud to stay awake, only getting to two seconds. “The storm’s almost here,” she told him sleepily.

She wasn’t sure if it was because she wasn’t so afraid of the storms anymore now that she knew how to count or because of something else, but she suddenly felt lighter now, like she’d finally set down a heavy weight that she’d been carrying around.

Hopper felt the opposite. His chest was much too tight, and he couldn’t get enough air. And he also knew that he wouldn’t change it for anything. He would pick up and carry around every bit of her guilt and sadness if she would let him. That's something he was actually good at.

He looked down at El who was now sleeping peacefully in his arms. He made her a silent promise- the day he finds Brenner, and he _would_ find him, the man was going to wish that he was already dead.


End file.
